infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

Language Log has a post on an issue that has beguiled me since I was a child. It discusses where colleges and universities with place names place their place names. It identifies the “premodifying form” like “New York University” and the “prepositional form” in “The University of Pennsylvania.” It tries to find a loose grammatical rule to little success, but generally in North America, public schools are “University of…”, unless they have the “state” modifier. Although it discusses how colleges are abbreviated in conversation, it doesn’t directly address the issue that beguiled me as a child.

My alma mater, The University of Oklahoma has used the prepositional form since it was established in 1890, but it is abbreviated in conversation and by the institution as “OU”, the premodifying form. It’s not “Oklahoma University,” so why are the letters switched? This switch isn’t universal, as the universities of Texas¹ and Illinois² are “UT” and “UI” in conversation. I But OU isn’t alone in the switch, either, Kansas and Colorado are “KU” and “CU.” I’m sure in all of these cases local custom and tradition trump whatever grammatical rules apply to university naming.

The post also doesn’t address the school I find most baffling of all, The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. It seems like a stretch to get “Virginia Tech” out of that mouthful. I could see ‘VPI,’ which I’ve seen used in some places, or “Virginia Poly,” like “Cal Poly.” I asked a VPIASU alumna a few years ago, and she said the adminstration decided to go with “Virginia Tech” for marketing reasons. I suppose this is less radical than Texas Tech and Texas A&M, where the abbreviations don’t actually stand for anything. One issue remains, however: why is it “and State University” when Virginia is technically a commonwealth and not a state?

1.Of course, many Aggies refer to UT-Austin as “TU,” since TAMU was the first university established in the Lone Star State. If you encounter one of these folks, remind them that their school was established during Reconstruction as a condition of Texas’ re-entry into the US.

2.Whenever I hear “UI” I think “User Interface,” rather than “University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.” I only seem to hear this spoken by Illinois natives; I always see it written as “UIUC,” which my dyslexic mind confuses with “UIC,” the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Driving around Wednesday afternoon, I noticed a substantial uptick in auto and pedestrian traffic around the UT campus. I felt a sudden pang of anxiety – did I have the first day of class wrong? I teach on the first day of class this semester – I know students are automatically dropped if they don’t attend the first class meeting, but what happens if the instructor doesn’t show up? I assured myself that the first day of class is indeed this Wednesday, August 30th.

This semester my friend Olivier is teaching what could only be an awesome class, RTF 370 “The Cinemas of Sub-Saharan Africa.” It was added late, and Olivier is worried that not enough students will enroll for the class to make. It’s not often that the RTF department offers classes that address film from the Global South, so this may be your only chance to take a class dealing with movies from the developing world. If you’re a UT student have any interest in African cinema, post-colonial cinema, or critical race theory, I strongly encourage you to enroll.

In other College of Communication news, The Daily Texan has a story on the closure of the CoC’s home across the street from home. According to the story, the space now occupied by Little City will become a “Chinese food cafe” and serve coffee roasted by Little City. There was no word on where they plan to locate the roaster. Hopefully the new restaurant will be cheap and casual enough for communication students to colonize.

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I’d never heard of Blackboard until I came to UT, but if you’ve been involved in higher education in the past few years, you probably have the kind of familiarity with Blackboard that breeds contempt. For the uninitiated, Blackboard is a server application for managing course documents and on-line student discussions. What you need to know about Blackboard is that it sucks, and its sales strategy relies on selling campus-wide licenses to university adminstrators, making it difficult for individual instructors to opt out and take a different approach to online class management.

Some of the problems with Blackboard are probably inherent to working with higher education. It requires what seem to me to be too many authentication steps, but this is probably due to worries about sharing intellectual property to the Internet and keeping student information confidential. I often find that I have to drill through too many menus to find the class or document I need, and this is probably a function of working at one of the largest universities in the country; the interface doesn’t scale when you’ve got 50,000 students.

Other problems, however, seem to arise from bad software. The discussion boards thread conversations in a way that requires you to click through to each individual comment. You can’t change the display like Slashdot to nest comments or simply display them in a single flat page. Diffferent discussions are kept in different folders, requiring too many clicks to change conversation. Finally, students cannot create their own discussion threads. While in an intro-level class this might be a nice features to keep inappropriate content off of the boards, but grad students should be allowed to start new threads without needing adminstrator access. I attribute this poor software design to the lack of competition in the “Learning Management” space.

And it looks like that space might get smaller. According to a post by Tim O’Reilly, Blackboard is starting to enforce software patents, presumably to keep competitors down. It’s already suing a smaller competitor Desire2Learn, and open-source projects working on an alternative to Blackboard like Moodle are also fearful of the well-funded litigious wrath of Blackboard.

According to O”Reilly’s post, the open-source projects are using this Wikipedia article to compile information about the history of course management for future prior-art challenges to Blackboard. Like Tim, I’m a little curious about their choice of Wikipedia as a tool for collecting data about online learning. First, it seems like a separate wiki would be more effective as a collaboration tool. (Moodle has set one up.) Secondly, I wonder what credibility Wikipedia has in an issue like this. Tim says the use of Wikipedia to store information about prior art “says something important about the role that Wikipedia is beginning to play as a canonical source for information about important topics.” While Wikipedia was cited in an Appellate court decision, the judges were roundly criticized for using the online encyclopedia as a source of information, and in a case that would revolve around online collaboration, I think Wikipedia’s mode of production would be debated.

Regardless, Blackboard’s patent trolling only makes my distaste for the software even stronger, and I hope that UT and other universities can move to better designed and, hopefully, open-source solutions, rather than support bad software and bad business with student money.

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I’m always a little dismayed when back-to-school season starts up in mid-July – it seems a month and a half is more than ample time to be shopping for folders and hand sanitizer. The New York Times is in the back-to-school spirit, as well, with a special section about colleges and college life today.

Two stories mention my alma mater, The University of Oklahoma, arguing that it’s an overlooked hotbed of academic excellence. One story, titled “Redrawing the College Map” discusses how elite institutions have become so competitive that many bright students are turning to second-tier institutions. It quotes Mark A. Longenecker, who I guess is an education policy researcher. “The University of Oklahoma is a classic example,” he says. “Many students never used to consider it. Now it has the largest share of National Merit Scholars in the country.” Ugh, I really do think the National Merit issue is a canard. OU awards National Merit Scholars such generous scholarships that students of modest means can’t really afford to go elsewhere. (As a freshman, I got a few thousand dollars in cash after paying for tuition, books, and housing.) While the school has the most National Merit Scholars per capita (I think rival UT-Austin has the largest absolute number) most of the students attend on OU’s nearly open admissions policy. The other story notes that OU has an 82 percent acceptance rate. My experience at OU was that while there were many very bright students, classes were geared toward slightly above-average students. I and many of my peers were bored and unchallenged in classes, and campus life had little to offer beyond football and church. The National Merit statistic is used to mask an tedious and conservative environment.

I attended OU nearly a decade ago, and perhaps things are less dreary. For example, there were no venues for indie rock bands when I attended, and now there is The Opolis, which is owned by members of The Starlight Mints. And perhaps classes have gotten more interesting, but OU needs to develop a better strategy for attracting top students and raising its profile than simply handing money to good test-takers.

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Austin blogs are abuzz today with the release of a study that says Austin is the third best-educated city in the US. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that Austin follows Seattle and San Fran in the rankings, considering UT-Austin was for many years the largest college campus in the country. (It’s now the fifth largest.) However, my hometown of Tulsa checks in as the 19th best-educated city, ahead of Columbus, which is home to The Ohio State University. I guess megacampuses can only go so far in raising the collective intelligence of a city, but Minneapolis, with the University of Minnesota, is ranked fifth.

Whenever I read these studies, I’m a little surprised to see really big cities fall at the bottom of the list. It’s not surprising to see Philadelphia come in at number 50 (out of 53). When I lived there, I was confronted with unimaginable stupidity on a daily basis, but I would attribute the low ranking to the white flight that led most of the middle-and-upper class to the suburbs, so much of the city is full of poor neighborhoods and undereducated citizens. Still, New York City comes it at 32, Los Angeles at 41, and Chicago at 39. These cities seem to be full of educated professionals living in the city limits. Perhaps immigration could account for the lower percentages of college and high-school grads.

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TechCrunch says the new Google Spreadsheet isn’t public yet, but Google has a public preview available. Like GMail, it’s a Web-based productivity application, and it will allow you to import spreadsheets as Excel files or CSV (comma-separated values). At first, I thought a Web-based spreadsheet was a silly idea - they have to Web-ify everything? Then I thought back to TAing this past semester. The professor and I traded the same spreadsheet of student grades back-and-forth via email, so many times, it became difficult to keep track of changes. If the new Google Spreadsheet allows sharing between multiple users and version control, this could be an ideal solution for lightweight spreadsheet users (like me) who spend a lot of time sharing spreadsheets.

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My students in the “New Communication Technologies” class I’m TAing this semester are taking their last exam tomorrow. Yesterday, I conducted a review session while the professor was presenting at an open source workshop. A few weeks ago, I had given lectures on social software and open source modes of production. RSS was on the review sheet, so of course one of the questions yesterday was “What’s RSS?” Geeky readers may be snickering at this point, but explaining RSS to undergraduate film majors is surprisingly hard. When I explained it as a way to track blogs to see when they’re updated, students ask, “Is that like when Facebook emails me to tell me when someone’s left a comment on my page?” No, it isn’t.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they ask this when I can’t expect them to know the differences in the underlying technology. Their eyes glaze over when I use phrases like “machine-readable metadata format.” Students seem to get the concept of metadata when I explain that IDv3 tags are a metadata format for describing the content of mp3 files, but they don’t really seem to get that RSS is a way to describe the content of a blog. During research presentations last week, a student said that Brightcove will have RSS feeds, “so it will be really easy for bloggers to put video on their site.” I think one problem I have with explaining RSS to these students is that I give the RSS feed too much agency. It isn’t the RSS feed that tells you that a blog has been updated. The RSS reader tells you a blog has been updated after it checks the RSS feed. I guess I don’t even make this distinction in my own mind.

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Sweet Sassy Molassy, Mark Cuban is coming to the RTF department! Cuban is a pretty polarizing figure, and I’m not sure what to make of him sometimes, but I do think he has interesting things to say that relate to my research, so I’m excited about the talk. He’ll be here in April as part of the master class series. I knew I’d already missed Mike Judge a few weeks back, but I only now looked at the master class schedule, and John Pierson, who teaches producing in the department, has lined up an impressive list of speakers. Richard Linklater is speaking this week, and Kevin Smith, Chuck Norris, and Ray Harryhausen are also coming.

Studio 4D can get crowded pretty fast, and I’m told Mike Judge’s appearance was totally crazy. The department has set up seating priorities that privileges students in Pierson’s class first, then gives seats to RTF students and faculty, other UT folks, and, finally, the general public.

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The College Board is promoting a rise in the number of high-school students taking Advanced Placement exams, while Kevin Drum has an interesting discussion of the potential downsides of using AP courses for college credit. In particular, some have complained that AP tests require students to learn a broad range of information without developing analytical skills.

I would agree with the depth issue: standardized tests push teachers toward teaching the test and away from developing analytical and, more importantly, writing skills. I remember some tests like the literature and U.S history exams had written portions, but to do well students needed to write in a very formulaic way. We were told that if the topic sentence fell anywhere other than the start of the paragraph, we’d be scored down.

I do think that AP tests are of some value to students. I took six AP exams in high school, which got me out of about 30 hours of coursework and a useless “AP Scholar with Distinction” award. This gave me a lot of flexibility to explore majors my first few years of college and kept me out of giant lecture classes. At the University of Oklahoma, the classes I tested out of would have been broad surveys with multiple-choice exams anyway, so I don’t see how AP classes are an inferior form of instruction. If I had been able to go to a liberal arts school or a prestige university, I might have missed out, but it seems like these lower-division classes mostly made up for deficiencies in high-school education, rather than encouraging students to think critically and communicate their ideas.

I wouldn’t blame AP tests for weak college students. Instead, the K12 system needs to develop better college prep and vocational programs and reduce the reliance on standardized testing for assessment. Unfortunately, the current political climate is pushing schools in the opposite direction.

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